A decision support system for drought characterization and management

A decision support system has been developed for drought characterization a nd management. The purpose of the decision support system is to assist the operators and water managers of the water supply system of the City of Lexi ngton, Kentucky. The motivation of this study was a severe drought that occ urred in the state of Kentucky during the summer of 1988. The data derived from the City of Lexington, Kentucky and the Kentucky River Basin were empl oyed in this study. The developed decision support system consists of three components: a water demand forecasting component, a streamflow forecasting component, and an integrated expert system component. The water demand and streamflow forecasting components of the decision support system predict t he water consumption for the City of Lexington and the flow in Kentucky Riv er at Lock 10 near Winchester, Kentucky, respectively. The lead time of the forecasting models was taken as five days as they were intended to be empl oyed in developing a short-term drought management policy. Various modeling techniques ranging from regression and time series analysis to the relativ ely mew technique of expert systems and artificial neural networks were exp lored for forecasting both water demand and streamflow. The integrated expe rt system component consists of five sub-components. Each sub-component ent ails developing a knowledge base for a specific purpose. The expert system component integrates all sub-components and characterizes the drought poten tial in the coming five days and recommends a drought management policy for the week to come. The developed decision support system is capable of runn ing on a personal computer and provides a user-friendly platform for decisi on-makers to explore a wide range of drought management alternatives.